"Negative."
He finally managed to find the wire bundle from the autotrack circuit to the main bus and unplugged it. He had no way of monitoring the circuit, no way of knowing if just unplugging the thing would reset it or if it had suffered any damage or was permanently burned open.
With unsteady fingers he plugged the wire bundle connectors back in. "All right, Ann," he said. "We'll give it one more try…
Another blinding flash of light off the port side of the Nimitz, but this one was accompanied by a ball of flame that rolled up from the deck of the Shiloh. The heat and the concussion even from miles away could be felt by the whole Nimitz crew.
Edgewater, feeling the intense heat, understood it meant the death of Shiloh. "Bring Callaghan, north alongside her," Clancy ordered, wiped the sweat from his forehead and stared for a moment at his smoke-blackened hand. "Have the destroyer help transfer the wounded. Have them take over the anti-air duties until Hue City moves into position. Air Ops, bring Bravo flight north to help find those Soviet aircraft. Looks like Arkhangel's getting into the act."
As Edgewater turned to issue the orders, Clancy picked up the phone to CIC, at the same time looking out through hazy oily smoke at the burning Aegis-class cruiser on the horizon. Another secondary explosion sent a mushroom of flames skyward. He waited until the sound of the explosion, rolled across the Nimitz a few seconds later before speaking. "What's the tally, Commander?" He almost didn't want to know. "Valley Forge, Vandergrift, Arkansas and your old Persian Gulf flagship Lasalle," Jacobs said, his voice flat. "All badly damaged or destroyed. Vandergrift… was lost with all hands. Sorry, sir."
Sorry… just sorry as hell… Would it have happened if the armchair boys hadn't held the tight leash on him for so long…?
Two Aegis cruisers dead… it was worse than Clancy had thought. Without the anti-air coverage provided by the two cruisers, they were almost sure to suffer even heavier losses. In another hour — maybe minutes — the whole fleet could be destroyed… "We've got eighteen casualties ourselves," Jacobs forced himself to go on. "There's a hundred injured and we've lost both waist catapults, one elevator and all our port-side guns and rockets. May have problems recovering planes on the landing strip: the first set of arresting cables is fouled up. He paused. Then: "Orders, sir?"
Orders? Any orders he gave at this point would be too little too late. But orders were what admirals gave. Good, bad, too late… okay, at least he would not make it easy for the Russians. He'd give them the fight they wanted…. "Call battle staff to the bridge," Clancy said. "We've got to get the wagons in a circle—"
The loudspeaker blared: "Collision warning, all hands, collision warning."
"Portside, Admiral," Jacob's voice was blaring at him but seemed strangely remote, like a surreal movie dream sequence…. Port side, heading right for us…"
Clancy stared out the bridge through broken window panes. His rational head told him that he wouldn't be able to see the missile, traveling low and fast and just skimming the waves, but he stood there anyway, as though mesmerized. "Hard port, flank speed," Edgewater was shouting now. "Signal the fleet that Nimitz is maneuvering to port… "
But the missile kept coming, splitting the air at supersonic speed, seeking its target, and an end to its long, lethal journey.
Skybolt fired. Saint-Michael's body felt as though it had burst into flame. The pain was a weight, crushing him.
A flash of light in the command module changed to a yellow glow, as if the module were a piece of burning phosphorous. A high-pitched whine blared, louder and louder, undiminished by helmet or earphones. The module, exposed to open space now, should have felt icy cold but instead it felt as if it were a boiling cauldron.
Through it all he thought he heard a pounding from somewhere beneath him, growing more insistent as he fought to stay conscious. Then a piece of some long-destroyed console broke free and slammed into the side of his helmet, deciding the fight for him. Everything — the pain, the heat, the sound — mercifully snapped off.
Back on Nintitz there was a flash of light, a split-second of pure whiteness like a powerful flashbulb going off. Clancy blinked. Was that what death was like? A quick flash? Poof and out?
A magnum explosion now roiled the sea into foam not a half mile from Nimitz's scarred port side. The concussion from the blast hit the Nimitz, rattling the ninety-one-thousand-ton vessel like a rick of straw in the wind, but…
But that was all. Noise, rolling thunder, then dead silence. "What the hell…?" The admiral picked up the phone again. "Clancy here. What the hell happened out there? Did the missile self-destruct?"
"Damned if I know, Admiral," Jacobs said. "We got hit with a powerful energy surge just before that last explosion. Knocked a lot of our stuff into standby. Radars, comm, sonar — everything was bumped off the line… We just now got it back. Could someone have popped a nuke off up there?"
"Well, if it were a nuke I think we'd be on our way to the bottom or to the moon. Get a poll of the other ships—"
Off the bow about ten miles in the distance, he saw what appeared to be a perfectly straight arc of lightning slice across the dark sky. Its flash was like lightning, except Clancy had never seen a straight lightning bolt before…
This one terminated in a huge fireball with tongues of flames shooting out in all directions. The fireball flared to an enormous size, lighting the ocean like a second sun, then disappeared.
"There it goes again, Admiral," Jacobs said from down below. "Another glitch, we're resetting now—"
"Wait a minute… wait a minute…"
"There's another one, sir." This from a damage-control seaman on the bridge, pointing back toward the northwest. "They're all around us, like some damn crazy lightning storm. "
"That's not lightning," Clancy said, beginning to understand. He stared up into the night sky, shaking his head slowly at the thin clouds and hazy stars. "That, gentlemen, is our guardian angel… "
For the next few minutes the scene around the Nimitz was eerie, unearthly, near-supernatural. A straight lightning bolt would flash, followed by a fireball near the sea. A few times the lightning would strike the sea, sending a geyser of steamy water a hundred or so feet into the air; then another bolt would strike and a fireball would erupt again.
As spectacular as the sight looked to the men aboard the Nimitz and her support vessels, it was even more impressive to the pilot of the lead Soviet Sukhoi-24 bomber, who was viewing it out his windscreen. While trying to concentrate on radar indications, threat-warning receivers and strike-radar returns, his attention was being diverted outside to the strange flashes of light that kept dancing out of the sky. Several times a minute the clouds would erupt in a circle of light and then a streak of fire would lance down and hit the ocean. Almost each time there was an answering explosion — apparently the explosions were not happening on any of the American ships. The whole phenomenon reminded him of a meteor shower, the most dazzling meteor shower he or anybody else had ever seen…
As the Soviet strike force approached the outermost American escorts, the flashes of light began to form eerie pillars of fire that seemed to block their path like a shimmering curtain pulled toward them. At the same time the intermittent threat-warnings from the American carrier-based fighters began to diminish. Had they managed to run under the F-14 Tomcats?
Suddenly the lead Sukhoi pilot's cockpit was filled with a flash of fire and light. He struggled for control of his bomber, watching with disbelieving eyes as the radar altimeter, which measured the distance between the belly of the bomber and the deadly waves below, dipped almost to zero.